01-31-2016 01:56 PM
If you browse auction listings from the eBay site that is for that domain, such as U.S (.com) or U.K. (.co.uk) certain items have written in bold right below the listing "Free International Shipping." Yet navigate to the actual listing and it is never free. The only items I've ever seen that boldly state "Free International Shipping" that are actually free for shipping are from Japan or China.
eBay's system is littered with bugs (many continual long-standing) throughout, with stuff like this, false notifications in messaging, items bid on not showing up in the Activity tab until an entire day later, the Activity tab losing auctions I've recently won and not being able to see them again etc... Stupid bugs like every time for example I try to send a seller a question the system never recognizes the CAPTCHA the first time ever. The second time yup it will recognize it but never the first time. The notification system in eBay is absolutely useless, most of the time it notifies me that I have a new message long after I have read the message. I've submitted feedback many times to eBay about these things they don't care about the quality of their system or the user interface. The "Free International Shipping" bug which has been around for ages is yet another example of the poor quality of eBay's software.
01-31-2016 03:45 PM
I'm not going to argue with your remarks on the clunky systems in place, but I was wondering about the Free International Shipping on dotCOM and dotCOdotUK.
Both those sites have the Global Shipping Program available to sellers and I wonder if you are conflating Free Shipping with the Import Fees (duty, sales tax and service charge) of the GSP.
It would be yet another way that the GSP annoys customers.
01-31-2016 04:07 PM - edited 01-31-2016 04:07 PM
@femmefan1946 wrote:
I'm not going to argue with your remarks on the clunky systems in place, but I was wondering about the Free International Shipping on dotCOM and dotCOdotUK.
Both those sites have the Global Shipping Program available to sellers and I wonder if you are conflating Free Shipping with the Import Fees (duty, sales tax and service charge) of the GSP.
It would be yet another way that the GSP annoys customers.
In addition, since the UK site uses the term "free postage", I'm wondering if this buyer is actually doing searches on the .co.uk site.
01-31-2016 05:50 PM
Hello 'winepress',
Hmmm, nice to have a good whinge on the boards now and again, i'n't it.
<<certain items have written in bold right below the listing "Free International Shipping." Yet . . . it is never free.>>
That's true. If you do much shopping on ebay, especially internationally, you just have to tell yourself that it is not likely to be
free. Click on the listing to see if it is at least affordable and decide from there. I suspect the seller has the listings set up for
shipping-included locally and unfortunately this is displayed sometimes.
Or maybe if the seller is choosing the GSP for international items, and the seller includes local ship costs, he might mistakenly
think he can use the GSP for international sales and that will be Free too.
Hey, don't laugh. I saw a US listing like that just the other day. It was cute, in away. He says "FREE Overseas postage - item
will be mailed through EBay's Global Delivery system." Haha, he actually thinks his items will ship Free around the world.
<<the Activity tab losing auctions I've recently won and not being able to see them again etc..>>
Do you mean the listing was removed by ebay? Did you get a notice from ebay about it? Sometimes a listing gets removed
for VeRO violations, or worse, the seller turns out to be a scammer and ebay/paypal finally caught up with him. In the first
case you might still get the item if it was paid for, in the second -- it's time to file for a refund.
<<to send a seller a question the system never recognizes the CAPTCHA the first time ever >>
I 'think' I know why that is, - it has something to do with timing. If you spend too long on the question (and it is not long at all)
you have to re-enter the numbers. Or if they are hard to decipher, click on Listen to the numbers. Some times I am sending
several "how much $$ to Canada" queries so if I quickly paste my same question the system accepts first time. If I pause to
type a detailed inquiry, I will have to send it twice.
That's my theory, anyway.
<<The notification system in eBay is absolutely useless. . .>>
It is certainly not fast. I have a couple of "followed searches" for items I want. It seems to take 2 days for the email notice
of a new listing to arrive. The last time I received an email about an item, I quickly logged in only to find someone else had
bought it the day before! Oh well. Serves me right for not personally checking in more often, I suppose.
But like you say, for highly sought-after items, the notification system doesn't help much.
<<The "Free International Shipping" bug which has been around for ages is yet another example of the poor quality of
eBay's software.>>
I don't know what listings you were seeing, but I'm wondering if they were GSP items because the GSP information is not
conveyed very well on the ebay site. Not just the Free shipping mistake, but the costs as well. The GSP listing might say
shipping is $14.86 but when we click on it we see that it is really $19.37 plus the import charges.
It's never the other way round.
Maybe the whole thing is simply too 'big', and hence more little glitches and bugs will show up on a system so large. Little
inconveniences, in my opinion, but definitely not enough to get wound up about. Well, it hasn't put me off shopping, not yet
anyway.
01-31-2016 06:45 PM
I noticed this the other day as well. The listings clearly said FREE INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING but when I clicked on them the shipping was nuts.
01-31-2016 07:57 PM
@marnotom! wrote:
@femmefan1946 wrote:
I'm not going to argue with your remarks on the clunky systems in place, but I was wondering about the Free International Shipping on dotCOM and dotCOdotUK.
Both those sites have the Global Shipping Program available to sellers and I wonder if you are conflating Free Shipping with the Import Fees (duty, sales tax and service charge) of the GSP.
It would be yet another way that the GSP annoys customers.
In addition, since the UK site uses the term "free postage", I'm wondering if this buyer is actually doing searches on the .co.uk site.
Yes I am browsing the .com and .co.uk sites. Not all of these are GSP auctions and some of these have stated "Free International Shipping" but the shipping is never free. I can't find any at the moment so I don't know maybe it's my Postal Code (entered or not.) These auctions stated "Free International Shipping" not "Free Postage." If I switch to the .ca site it has never shown "Free International Shipping" by the auction, switch back to the .co.uk or .com site and it says "Free International Shipping."
01-31-2016 08:14 PM
No these listings were not removed by eBay. If I remember the ones that disappeared were ones that just fell outside of the 60 day window. In the Activity panel there is a filter to see orders from the last 60 days (and of course I had selected the all filter.) I have had auctions end and then fall outside of the 60 day window and they haven't shown up even if I selected the year. Yet other auctions that I had won earlier during the same year showed up. I have saved these auction pages locally to my computer and they are even still there on eBay just not in my Activity panel. I'm not sure what hidden orders are but that check-box didn't cause them to show up either. In this case I needed to see these particular listings I had won and couldn't. If a listing I have bid on gets removed I have never gotten a notice or a message from eBay. The listing just goes poof. I have resorted to saving all auctions I bid on and win locally to my computer for reference.
You could be right about the CAPTCHA but it seems it is a bug to me. I'll try doing a quick copy-paste, enter CAPTCHA, send next time. As for the notification system I don't use because I don't trust it! Even on the Messages tab it is supposed (or at least I think that is what the intention is) to show a number by it indicating how many messages you haven't read. That doesn't work some of the time either. The only reliable way I have of knowing if I have an unread message is to go and look at them.
I've had so many issues with eBay you're right it isn't something to get annoyed about but still! For example, just the other day I was outbid on an auction and then I see that I have been outbid on it in the Activity panel. It shows in red Outbid below it. So I go back to the auction and increase my bid and then become the highest bidder again. So far so good then I go back to the Activity panel and it shows the new price for the auction but it still shows in red that I have been Outbid? When this happens I have to refresh the page more than once, potentially logging out, closing the browser, clearing the browser's cache, reopening the browser and logging back in again to see that I have not actually been Outbid.
01-31-2016 10:06 PM
"navigate to the actual listing and it is never free."
"never" is a big word.
While many listings will state "free shipping" when the "free" is limited to some countries, some sellers do in fact offer "free shipping" to international buyers.
I was one of them until my retirement last year. Every listing offered "free shipping" worldwide and it meant exactly that: no shipping charge was ever added regardless of the location of the buyer. Looking at many listings a few minutes ago I fund hundreds offering "free shipping worldwide".
Much depends on the type of products one sells: many can easily be shipped at low costs worldwide allowing the seller to absorb the shipping costs in the selling price.
So, please, avoid using "never" when it actually applies to those listings you looked at.
01-31-2016 10:18 PM
@winepress780 wrote:Yes I am browsing the .com and .co.uk sites. Not all of these are GSP auctions and some of these have stated "Free International Shipping" but the shipping is never free. I can't find any at the moment so I don't know maybe it's my Postal Code (entered or not.) These auctions stated "Free International Shipping" not "Free Postage." If I switch to the .ca site it has never shown "Free International Shipping" by the auction, switch back to the .co.uk or .com site and it says "Free International Shipping."
If you do run into a set of search results on the UK site where the term "Free International Shipping" is used by eBay, could you take a screen shot and post it, and also make note of whether you were logged in at the time you made your search? Thanks. 🙂
02-01-2016 06:02 AM
Item # 131558936372
Browse to the auction on the .com site and then look at the listings for the seller
UNCLE MIKES SLING SWIVEL
$9.34
Buy It Now
Free international shipping
Go to the auction and you'll see that shipping to Canada is $9.50.
$9.50 USPS First Class Mail Intl / First Class Package Intl Service
Ships to: Worldwide
This is not a GSP auction.
02-01-2016 06:08 AM
So I signed in to the .com site and the Free International Shipping did not show underneath the auction. I signed out and it still didn't show up again. However, when I closed the browser and cleared its cache and reopened the browser and went back to the seller's listing it showed Free International Shipping again. It didn't matter if I entered in my Postal Code or not. On the .ca site it did not show Free International Shipping.
02-01-2016 06:13 AM
Fair enough. I should clarify I don't think I've ever seen one that was free myself but that doesn't mean that there aren't any.
02-01-2016 06:51 AM
02-01-2016 06:52 AM
02-01-2016 05:27 PM
I can't get that listing to show the free shipping but I have the seen the same thing happen on other listings in the past...although not often.
02-01-2016 09:31 PM
Found a seller who has over 400 items listed. Browse to the .com site. I browsed through 3 pages of the seller's listings and every one of them said "Free International Shipping" and every one that I spot checked (about 5) by navigating to the auction had shipping charges. These were GSP auctions. I've attached a screenshot.
IMO this is yet another example of blatantly poor quality software and it's obvious eBay has issues with the quality of the software they develop and holes in their quality assurance (if they even have such a thing.) If this is not a bug then it is false advertising to state that an item has Free International Shipping but there are actually shipping charges. This is for items in the U.S. and being in Canada you would expect that Free International Shipping would mean free shipping to Canada from the U.S.
I'm not a beta tester for eBay's buggy software I don't get paid and I don't think anyone else gets paid on this board either. People have become so used to low quality bug riddled software these days that this stuff is considered normal and acceptable. A lot of software produced these days is rubbish and people are still shocked that a multi-million dollar company can produce such rubbish but they do everyday.
Example
Digital Thermometer Food Meat Cooking BBQ Instant Probe Kitchen Electronic Oven
$38.99
Buy It Now
Free international shipping
From United States
Customs services and international tracking provided
Price: US $38.99
Buy It Now
Shipping:
$9.20 International Priority Shipping to Canada via the Global Shipping Program
help icon for Shipping - opens a layer
| See details
Item location:
Multiple Locations, United States
Ships to:
United States and many other countries | See details
Import charges:
$9.17 (amount confirmed at checkout)
help icon for Shipping - opens a layer
No additional import charges on delivery
02-01-2016 09:33 PM
Here is the second image showing the shipping charges for the Free International Shipping auction.
02-01-2016 09:40 PM
I just checking that listing again for;
UNCLE MIKES SLING SWIVEL, MODEL 1403-2, FOR 1" SLINGS, NEW, 2634
and it shows "Free International Shipping" on my computer as it did before when I took the screenshots earlier in the day.
02-01-2016 09:53 PM
Sorry I forgot to include the item number for the screenshot.
Digital Thermometer Food Meat Cooking BBQ Instant Probe Kitchen Electronic Oven
Item Number 262271292529
Really I haven't found a single item of the 400+ listed by that seller where it didn't say "Free International Shipping" and not a one where the shipping was actually free.
02-01-2016 10:05 PM
" Browse to the .com site."
Why bother? If you live in Canada, keep it simple: browse and buy on eBay.ca